do this, he may be as delicate and dainty as he likes I would rather hear the most untuneable barrel organ that ever infuriated Babbage, or the loudest railway porter that ever shouted unintelligibly the name of his station. The frightful imposture of setting up for a poet with a fine stock of dactyls, spondees, trochees, and the like-but without an original, or even a healthy idea-is to me intolerable

I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew.

But it is vain to protest: these vacuous gentlemen will do it.

Writers of lower rank-the novelist and the journalist to wit-are just as bad as the poet. The ordinary novel of to-day is an abomination. I will not name names. Take the writer you think the best; examine his master-work fairly; then say if there is a character in it like anybody you ever metor expect ever to meet-in actual life. And

You

why must every story have a villain in itor mayhap a dozen villains, male and female, each more atrocious than the other? don't encounter such people in society: if you did, society would be intolerable. Why is fiction to be more vile and vulgar than life? Is this the true function of letters? Here is the poet teaching you that life is a long unhappy dream-and the novelist that your wife is probably a bigamist and your daughter a murderess. Where are we to look for something healthier? Try the journals.

Now the press which lives by cheapness and has to appeal to an uneducated audience has a vast number of faults; but it is on the whole better than that of any other country, and I shall not criticise it. But there are journals which profess a higher tone, and ask for refined readers, and yet play precisely the part of the novelist who puts impossible villains in his stories. These newspapers do their utmost to furnish their

public with new sensations. They invent social horrors, and lecture upon them with affected indignation. One week all English girls are wicked: another, all English matrons get tipsy in private. This kind of writing is usually done, I am told, by briefless young barristers, fresh from scrambling hot coppers from their Club windows to the University roughs, and too ignorant of the world to know the harm they are doing by such libels. They are not so much to blame as the sordid persons who employ them.

It would be tedious to trace the morbid tendency of contemporary literature through all its ramifications. Let me briefly recapitulate. The poet howls like a dog in the December moonlight about the miseries of this world and the uncertainties of the next. I say that, to the true poet and to the brave man, this world is full to the brim of happiness, and that the future is as certain as the truthfulness of God. The novelist

puts on his scrofulous pages contemptible wretches who commit purposeless crimes. I say that such people are, luckily, very few— and that the writer who professes to depict life is not justified in disgusting us with such abominable inventions. The journalist ascribes to English ladies and gentleman a new vice and folly every week. Of him it is sufficient to say that he lies . . . for money.

Cannot we have a healthier literature? Are we to be always at the mercy of people who seem as if they dined on underdone pork-chops washed down with laudanum? O for one hour of Jonathan Swift, to clear the literary atmosphere! Imagine a new Laputa, with Darwin and Tyndall and Huxley among its professors! What havoc would the mighty Dean make with our literary and scientific Yahoos.

Is it absolutely impossible to revive in England the literature which is natural to the national character... a literature that is simple,

healthy, true, Homeric, Shakespearian? The general argument is that the public get what they demand, and can expect nothing better... indeed that anything better would not pay. But this argument involves two absurdities: that the professed leaders of thought should bring themselves down to the vulgar level— and that literature is to be measured only by its rate of payment. Better that the art of printing had not been invented than that it should find employment for men of ability mean enough to employ their ability in pandering to the opinions and passions of the mob for a pecuniary consideration. A man of genius who writes to live-and who consequently puts thoughts which he knows to be false into language that he knows to be contemptible-is one of the saddest objects that I know.

Why should we endlessly study the wrong side of the tapestry? Why always prefer the hideousness to the loveliness of life?